Month: December 2005

I’d like to thank all of the bloggers that have enriched my life over the past year with the only gift that has any value on the web: a link. You are all doing wonderful work that I appreciate deeply. Thank you all.

Wonderful

Rumours that Google will open an office in Waterloo have been circulating since Google seed investor David Cheriton donated $25 million to the UW School of Computer Science. The rumours have now been further fueled by a job posting for a Mobile Wireless Application Developer based in Waterloo.

Bob Ueland has been putting my stalled attempt at posting solutions to all the exercises in the programming classic, Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs, to shame with a new newsgroup, SICP Exercises, over on Yahoo! Groups.

During the period of April 2005 to October 2005, I broadcasted numeriuos statements alleging environmental and labour law infringements by Activa Holdings Inc. on a website I established. since broadcasting those statements, I have since learned that Activa is not responsible for any of the fuel spills or labour law infringements depicted or reported on my website. Activa has not been charged with any environmental or labour law infringements. I apologize unreservedly to Activa Holding Inc. for these broadcasts. I am pleased to make this clairification and apology and regret any inconvience and embarassment which may have been caused to Activa Holdings Inc.

Visual Studio can be one of the programmer’s best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio’s insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our programming intelligence rather than augmenting it? This talk dissects the code generated by Visual Studio; analyzes the appalling programming practices it perpetuates; rhapsodizes about the joys, frustrations, and satisfactions of unassisted coding; and speculates about the radical changes that Avalon will bring.

I don’t do very much programming in Visual Studio, anymore. Eclipse sees to that. Nonetheless, Charles’s offers some interesting warnings against tools that try to do too much.

“I don’t think we have another 20,000 years,” Jared Diamond said in his impeccable German and with the same unassuming, polite composure with which he had answered all preceding questions. And he added: “I think it’s closer to fifteen years.”

I’ve occassionally wondered what the end of oil will look like. Tonight I thought I’d crunch some numbers to get a better idea.

Let’s start with current daily consumption. I’ll use U.S. numbers because they are quite easy to find.

How much energy does the U.S. consume each day from fossil fuels? According to this CBC article, the U.S. consumes 20.52 million barrels of crude oil per day, each of which contains 1700kWh of energy (according to this site). By my calculations (20,520,000 barrels/24h x 1,700,000Wh/barrel) that comes out to 1454 gigawatts of power.

When the oil runs out that energy will need to be replaced if we are going to maintain our current lifestyles. Where will it come from?

My guess is electricity, either directly or indirectly. Directly if we switch to electric cars; indirectly if we use electricity to extract hydrogen from our environment to power our fuel-cell cars.

According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S., as of 2002, has the capability to produce 905 gigawatts of electricity, one third of which comes from natural gas and petroleum. That leaves about 604 gigawatts of coal, hydro, nuclear, and other renewable energy to see Americans through the end of oil.

So it looks as though Americans will need to more than triple their current capabilities (~600GW) to cover the loss off oil (~1450GW). Is that what they are planning for?

According to the same EIA article:

Of the new capacity, nearly 62 percent is projected to be natural-gas-fired combined-cycle, combustion turbine, or distributed generation technology. From 2011 to 2025, 105 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity is expected to be brought on line—more than one-half of it after 2020. From 2011 on, coal-fired capacity is expected to account for 40 percent of all capacity additions. Renewable technologies account for just over 5 percent of expected capacity expansion by 2025—primarily wind and biomass units. Distributed generation, mostly gas-fired microturbines, is expected to add just over 12 gigawatts. Because the best resources for hydropower have already been developed, hydropower capacity is expected to increase only slightly in the future.

Assuming that coal outlasts oil, that leaves about 105GW of new capacity will survive after we run out of oil.

That’s a far cry from the 1450 gigawatts needed to fill the gap.

I don’t want to guess what this means for the future, but it certainly doesn’t look good from where I sit.

Mandy and I have been using Vonage Canada as our primary phone service for over a year now and been very satisfied with it — especially the costs, although the voice quality is excellent, too.

We get our internet access via cable so we were able to sever all ties to Bell. Where we were formerly paying $60 per month for our phone service, our costs dropped to just $22 with Vonage, for a savings of about $456 per year.

Today I received an email from Vonage asking me to participate in a referral promotion that they have going. If I refer you to their service, you’ll get your first four months for the price of three.

So if you are in Canada and already planning to subscribe to Vonage’s service, send me an email and I’ll send you a coupon for a free month.

Disclaimer: For every new customer I refer, I receive two free months with their service.